Marina: “Living to live in a world of time beyond me”: Recognizing, Perceiving, and Understanding

Abstract

Marina is a readers’ favorite, owing in part at least to its being seen as positive. The relatively extensive commentary on the poem proves to be a mixed bag, with speculations concerning the applicability to Eliot’s own life and generally running from the sanguine to the joyous. As a dramatic monologue, the poem is complex, the speaker—Pericles— not quite all that he seems to be. His daughter has returned from a shipwreck that, it had been presumed, took her life—she is now, for many, a Christ-figure. She does not speak, and her father focuses on “images” of her. His tone and his words begin to suggest guilt for having constructed a faulty ship, in which his daughter very nearly lost her life.